By Kelley Glaister
I recently came across Andy Tran’s essay Gender Binarism and the Wilful Abjection of the Traceur, and decided to write a response to it. Considering several years have passed, it’s not a particularly timely response. But I felt it necessary given the paucity of writing on gender in parkour, and that Tran’s essay is still circulating.
Tran’s essay takes ideas that are based on incompatible grounding assumptions and attempts to use these ideas to prop each other up. Tran’s use of Jungian archetypes is in direct opposition to his suggestion that people who practice parkour are “a testament to the social construction of gender by becoming decidedly genderless.”[1] The concept of archetypes posits the collective unconscious, an unchanging psychic system of archetypes that exists in the same form in all individuals and precedes all social constructions. It relies on an assumption that male and female psyches are fundamentally different, a (false) assumption that is incompatible with the social construction of gender. His use of the notions of agency and abjection, furthermore, are incompatible with Jungian theory, and each other.
Even the way Tran writes problematic. He begins with “Despite Parkour culture recognizing that Parkour itself is a means of locomotion…” Putting the Unnecessary Capitalisation aside, there’s no use talking about parkour as though it’s a “giant coming down from the hillside to visit the townspeople.”[2] Parkour itself has no sentience, and no intentionality. In his essay, Tran has unquestioningly used ‘traceur’ to refer to male practitioners and ‘traceuse’ to refer to female ones, and furthermore has used the masculine term to refer to the general or neutral. If you were “assessing the gender constructions of dominant culture that apply to Parkour,” that would be the place to start. Instead, his decision reveals a base assumption of separateness in the very language he uses, and fails to investigate how language can constitute and reinforce such assumptions. I disagree with use of gender-specific nouns, especially in the context of parkour, but I’ll address that in another essay. Here, though, I have maintained the use of the terms traceur and traceuse when specifying gender (but, clumsily, have used ‘practitioner’ to refer to the general) simply to be able to respond to Tran more concisely.[3]
This is not an exhaustive criticism. Not by a long shot. There remain many points that I disagree with, many that are just nonsensical, and there are several glaring factual errors.[4] Anyway, here we go…
Space
Tran makes numerous references to space that are highly questionable because he relies on the distinction between public and private space. He states that parkour is “reclaiming private space for the public…” and specifically of traceuses “she brings private space into public consciousness.” These are odd contentions, and there is no definition of the terms provided. There isn’t a definition that I can imagine that places parkour within private space. The space that parkour ‘reclaims’ is always public space, and while not annexing this space as private, parkour practice perhaps appropriates it temporarily as personal space. The relevant opposition is not between public and private, but between expected and unexpected use of public space. So, rather than “reclaiming private space for the public,” parkour opens up within public space the possibility of non-normative behaviour. [5]
Traceuses and traceurs
Tran makes several claims about the people who practice parkour which are similarly dubious. Of our bodies he states, “There are two types that are severely overrepresented… The first is the extremely fit … The second is the pale and frail body type.” I’ve trained with a lot of people, and haven’t come across an abundance of ‘pale and frail body types’ anywhere.[6]
But let’s move on to how ‘the traceuse’ is characterised in this essay. (In line with Jungian influence, there seems to be only one. She is the idea, the archetype of the traceuse. Actual living women who are traceuses would presumably be judged lacking against this ideal. Too complex, too human.) Tran says she “stands as a particular statement about this psychogeography.” We are not statements about psychogeography, or about anything else. We are women training. To typify a traceuse as a statement appropriates her movement and her sweat as something that belongs to others (whoever is the audience of this ‘statement’) and not to herself.
Tran also later touches on the idea of traceuses being masculinised in the view of others. “To the spectator, the traceuse’s musculature is unfeminine, and yet the gymnast or the trampolinist or aerobics participant maintains her femininity. The body of the traceuse, then, is a cultural site of cultural defiance not because of how it appears, but because it moves.” To pretend that the only difference between a gymnast and a traceuse is movement completely ignores the plays of performativity undertaken by such athletes to ‘maintain (their) femininity’. Why do female gymnasts put so much glitter in their hair and costumes? Why do women’s floor routines have superfluous dance elements to link tumbling lines, where men’s floor routines don’t? Why does aerobics continue to exist? If and when a traceuse is accused of being unfeminine it’s not because of her movement. It’s because she doesn’t bother trying to use sequins as a bulwark against such accusations. She’s too busy training.
Binaries
Tran is completely inconsistent in his treatment of binaries and binarism. In his introduction he says the “…dichotomies of gender within the sport(. These binaries) are the very obstacles that lead to the gross male overrepresentation in the discipline and the deterrence of women from participation,” but he later claims “The binaries in Parkour complement each other. They act as the resolving counterparts to the female and male psyches respectively.” He also says “it is precisely the aim of Parkour and of the feminist agenda[7] to allow people to become non-gendered entities.” Aiming to ‘resolve the tensions’ between male and female psyches assumes there’s such a thing as a gender-specific psyche, and so can’t possibly contribute to people becoming non-gendered. Tran’s stated aim is “deconstructing gender binaries as they apply to Parkour.”[8] In fact, he seems intent maintaining such binaries, and even creating binaries where there were and need be none.
He claims, “the spectator who inspects carefully will see two Parkours…” No. They won’t. There are not two parkours. There’s one, if we consider it as an agreed-upon term to group together physical practice as well as tag our tribes. Or maybe there’s an infinite (but bounded) number of parkours, if each instance of people practicing reconstitutes parkour anew. But I’m getting off topic. My point is, there most certainly isn’t a masculine and a feminine version as Tran asserts (“The first is immediately visible. It is the active and masculine Parkour that triumphantly and nonchalantly moves upon described geographies with its own prescriptions…The second is the more passive and feminine Parkour that quietly and privately conditions for movement, but rarely engages in it.”) Tran has here endorsed both the primacy of the masculine in the binary, and the very same idea he earlier claimed that the traceuse rejects; that women’s proper place is sedentary. He assigned ‘triumphant’ movement to the masculine, and has taken movement away from the feminine, allowing the fictional ‘her’ only to rarely engage in it, while she spends the rest of ‘her’ time quietly in private. I can’t state it strongly enough: this is bullshit.
Binaries are problematic. One problem is they fix a gamut of experience into pitifully inadequate categories. Another is that they always contain implicit hierarchies. And, as Tran acknowledges, the subordinate term of the hierarchy is usually (and, need I say it, speciously) characterised as feminine. Active over passive, mind over body, rational over emotional. Tran upholds this: he calls his fictional masculine parkour “the heroic agent of the public who reclaims private space…” while the feminine one “is the other agent of the public who passively watches and prepares, but serves others in their time of need.”[9] The traceur is the ‘heroic’ agent, while the traceuse is just the ‘other’ one? Again, bullshit.
He also claims that, “practitioners of Parkour are then capable of resolving developmental conflicts that arise from the binarism of dominant culture.” This statement illustrates the major problem with Tran’s conception of gender binaries in this essay. Because he propounds archetypes, he’s actually propounding the ‘binarism of dominant culture’, although in a slightly different, more insidious version. Gender is not an either/or situation, it’s a whole spectrum of identity and experience and each position on this spectrum is valid. There are no activities, tendencies or spirits that are inherently either masculine or feminine, but thinking makes it so. And Tran’s thinking certainly does. We should be dismantling the fiction of gender-appropriate or gender-specific behaviour wholesale, not scrambling desperately to ‘resolve’, and so maintain, it.
Agency
Tran claims that “(the traceuse) is not only an agent of the public, but an agent of the feminine.” This is a grandiose statement, made without defining the terms ‘agent’, ‘public’ or ‘feminine’ at all. What exactly does this mean? What does it mean to be an agent of someone else? How can one possibly be an agent of the public? How can you conceive of ‘the public’ as a homogenous mass with a single will? Can you be an agent of the public without being a member of the public, as Tran asserts later in the essay? Does ‘the feminine’ mean the sum of people who are female? Or does it mean some essentialist force or quality that makes up female-ness? And why does it need an agent? What is it that ‘the public’ and ‘the feminine’ are trying to do?[10]
The idea of being the agent of the public or of the feminine is problematic for (at least) two reasons, and they are sides of the same coin. Firstly, in becoming an agent of someone else, one runs the risk of misrepresenting their will, and of stealing their own capacity to act. Even if it were possible, I’d bet any money ‘the public’ doesn’t want us to be their agent.
Secondly, in being saddled with the responsibility of agency on behalf others, don’t you lose the ability to be agentive for yourself? Perhaps a good example of this is service in the police force or the military. These people are agents of the state, and so barred from using their own personal agency in political matters. Becoming an agent (of the public or the feminine or anything else) would mean surrendering your own capacity to act, to serve some narrative other than your own. So making us into ‘agents of the feminine,’ while it sounds empowering, places yet another restriction on traceuses that traceurs don’t have to deal with.
Jung
Jungian archetypes are by definition unchangeable and unchanging, springing from the collective unconscious. Jung writes
“Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman… an imprint or “archetype” of all the ancestral experiences of the female, …if no women existed, it would still be possible… to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man.”[11]
It is completely illogical to attempt to use Jung’s notions of Animus and Anima, which he calls “an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system” while simultaneously claiming that “the traceur… (is) standing as a testament to the social construction of gender by becoming decidedly genderless.”
Jungian archetypes aren’t real. It’s a theory, and there is no way to prove (or disprove for that matter) their existence. At best they can be used as metaphors to discuss shared human experience. The problem is, they suck. These archetypes in particular, Animus and Anima, are an intensely sexist idea that would restrict the behaviour of people to what is imagined to be proper to their sex. Let’s ask Jung: “No one can get around the fact that by taking up a masculine profession, studying and working like a man, woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature.”[12] Tran claims that “Culture dictates that a male must be masculine, a female feminine.” Jung dictates that too:
“The feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one’s own background, and one’s real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.“[13]
Animus and Anima do not open up possibilities for individuals to explore repressed areas of their psyche, as Tran suggests when he states, “The practitioner is free to appropriate either spirit.” They maintain rigid distinctions between male and female psyches. In this way, they are convenient pressure release valves[14] for essentialist conceptions of gender, and preserve the rubbish idea of inherently masculine and feminine qualities, even naming them as such.
While he claims to be ‘assessing the gender constructions of dominant culture that apply to Parkour,” Tran is actually advocating the Jungian distinction. Tran suggests that Jung’s theories of archetypes as they relate to the sexes are equal and balanced. They aren’t.
“For women, Jung’s particular model militates against change in the social sphere. While men can keep control of all Logos activities and appropriate just whatever Eros they need as a kind of psychological hobby, women are by no means encouraged to develop Logos, since they are thought of as handicapped by nature in all Logos arenas. Thus the anima-animus theory does not lead to the integration of the sexes but, rather, to more separatism.”[15]
Abjection
Tran goes straight from Jungian archetypes to abjection, which is a bizarre logical lurch. Both ideas posit a ‘something’ outside our lived experience, something that cannot be accessed directly. Jungian archetypal theory posits a primordial and stable system of archetypes, which exists outside and prior to the formation of the personal unconscious. The assumption of abjection is a primordial semiotic order, an unstable base on which the Symbolic is erected. Animus and Anima can’t live in the semiotic order.
Tran claims, “If most traceurs and traceuses … find resolution between Animus and Anima, then what does the Parkour practitioner become? Practitioners willingly thrust upon themselves the title of “abject.”” This is just ridiculous; we do no such thing. Tran is the one that gives us this title. Unconvincingly.[16] Tran says “the traceur willingly accepts upon him/herself the state of being in-between” but it’s important to remember that not everything that is liminal is abject.[17] Tran tries to use the idea of abjection, again without defining what he means by the term. A (Kristevan) definition is that the abject is
“is neither object or subject; the abject is situated, rather at a place before we entered the symbolic order…a place where boundaries begin to breakdown, where we are confronted with an archaic space before such linguistic binaries as self/other or subject/object.[18]
Abjection is the exclusion, the pushing away, of what threatens the constitution of the self.[19] But, in claims like “By recognizing the binaries of gender that exist within Parkour and accepting them, the Parkour practitioner becomes the ‘slash’ between “traceur/traceuse””, Tran creates the impression that the abject is simply a third choice, the expansion of the binary to a triad. Abjection is not about recognising binaries and accepting them, any more than is it about the ‘slash’ between terms. The abject is something entirely outside the binary, and even the possibility of the binary. The slash is exactly what creates and maintains the binary. The abject is the eruption of the semiotic into the Symbolic order, which reveals the binary as constructed on unstable ground: “what is abject… is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”[20] The abject is the breakdown of binaries. The slash is the creation of binaries. Becoming the slash is a stupid idea.
Tran rightly asks “Is it desirable to become the abject?”[21] This is a complicated question, which he asks does not answer. He provides no reason to abject ourselves. Tran’s characterization of practitioners early in the essay at agents of this or that doesn’t gel with his later characterisation of us as abject, as to become abject is to evacuate the subject position. Agency requires subjecthood- the abject has no ‘capacity to act,’ and the only effect it can reliably bring about is repulsion in the subject.
To conclude…
While Tran states, “The abjected traceur/euse becomes a testament to all spectators who care to look that gender is a social construction,” his argument actually, thanks to Jung, assumes rigid and fundamental distinctions between the sexes. His gestures in the direction of the unfixed nature of gender are attempts use the cachet of third-wave feminism to cloak Jungian essentialist sexism. But it doesn’t work; it’s an indefensible, inconsistent line of reasoning. While I’ve no doubt it was well intentioned, Tran’s essay is restrictive, offensive and sexist.
You can read Andy Tran’s essay Gender Binarism and the Wilful Abjection of the Traceur here
[1] All italicised quotes are from Tran.
[2] Mos Def, Fear not of man. So to continue and recontexualise the quote, “We are [parkour]. Me, you, everybody, we are [parkour]. So, the next time you ask yourself where [parkour] is going, ask yourself… where am I going? How am I doing?”
[3] If you think this is a cop-out on my part, you’re right.
[4] For a start, that’s not how you spell Debord, there’s no such thing as Situationism and ‘engendered’ does not have the same meaning as ‘gendered’.
[5] Some other concepts that may relate to the use of space in parkour practice are Deleuze and Guatarri’s ideas of striated and smooth space as suggested by Jimena Ortuzar in Parkour or l’art du deplacement, A Kinetic Urban Utopia and Jean Francois Lyotard’s concept of scapelands, as suggested Michael Atkinson in Parkour, Anarcho-Environmentalim, and Poiesis. (These comparisons have their own problems, but are more relevant as they address the flows of power in space and the possibility of interrupting same.)
[6] It’s possible that my personal experience is skewed, but as this is a simple factual claim, you can look around at whom you’re training with next time, and see if it stacks up. He goes on to claim that “the thinner practitioners, who sport a much more androgynous body, are rendered more masculine through the practice.” Muscularity is not inherently masculine; everyone has muscles. It’s just one more (albeit deeply ingrained) stereotype that Tran propounds without questioning.
[7] There is not one feminist agenda. Feminism is such an active and divergent field that is probably makes more sense to speak in the plural, of feminisms. There isn’t a common aim, and there most certainly isn’t consensus on the possibility and desirability of becoming non-gendered.
[8] Again, fails to define his terms, this time ‘deconstruct.’ It is odd to use a term so strongly associated with Derrida, because the collective unconscious would be the ‘outside-text’ that Derrida famously said there isn’t.
[9] Of course, my focus here is on Tran’s maginalisation of women as passive. The equally offensive suggestion here is that the masculine would presumably ‘triumphantly and nonchalantly’ ignore others in their time of need.
[10] For a good overview of the various uses of the term ‘agency’ in different contexts, see Ahearn, L. M., Language and Agency, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 30, 2001, pp. 109-137) She details several of the more common uses of the term agency; to mean free will, to mean resistance or the capacity to resist, or, following Foucault, nearly impossible anyway. She also provides the provisional definition: “agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act,” and (quoting Karp I, Agency and social theory: review of Anthony Giddens, 1986.) “an agent refers to a person engaged in the exercise of power in the sense of the ability to bring about effects and (re) constitute the world.”
[11] Jung, C., ‘Marriage as a Psychological Relationship’ (1925) In The Development of the Personality. (His idea of Woman requires no women to exist? Brilliant. You wouldn’t want actual women to get in the way of a theory by, you know, proving it wrong.)
[12] Jung, C., ‘Woman in Europe’ (1927), in Civilization in Transition 2nd edn., trans. R F C Hull, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964, pp 117-18. He continues “She is doing something that would scarcely be possible for a man to do, unless he were a Chinese. Could he, for instance, be a nursemaid or run a kindergarten?” Which illustrates that Jung’s archetypal thinking isn’t just sexist, but racist as well. He once stated “”Even today the European, however highly developed, cannot live with impunity among the Negroes in Africa; their psychology gets into him unnoticed and unconsciously he becomes a Negro…” Jung, C., ‘Mind and Earth’, Civilisation in Transition, trans. R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1970. 29-49.
[13] Ibid, ‘Woman in Europe’ (my emphasis)
[14] What I mean is that ideas like Animus and Anima are used to explain away evidence that challenges the idea of gender-specific behaviour, and so extend the shelf-life of gender binaries by making them appear a little more plastic.
[15] Goldenberg, N. R., A Feminist Critique of Jung, Signs, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), p. 447
[16] For one thing, to actually be abject would be to exist outside language, where there are no titles. “When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine.” (my emphasis), Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror, University of Columbia Press, New York, 1982, pp 1
[17] For example, when you’re in flow states, you can lose the distinction between yourself and the world, in effect losing the subject position. But this is not an experience of the abject, or polymorphous perverse, but a jettisoning of the self-consciousness of self.
[18] Felluga, D. (2006). Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. October, 20, 2006. http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html. The prime example of the abject is a corpse; it was once alive (a subject) but is now dead (an object) and so is neither and both. When faced with a corpse, we are repulsed by it, in part because it threatens our own subjecthood. (Of course, there are also valid evolutionary reasons why people find corpses repulsive, reasons that have nothing to do with the Symbolic and everything to do with the spread of disease. The Symbolic, like the collective unconscious, cannot be proven/disproven to exist. )
[19] There is arguably a way in which practitioners are abjected by spectators. It’s when the movement is seen to challenge the boundary between animal and human, a kind of superhuman abjection. Abjecting practitioners then allows the spectator to push it away from themselves, thinking “I could never do that, it’s superhuman (or inhuman)”, and so maintain their subject position. This is exactly what we want to avoid, as it deters people from trying.
[20] Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror, University of Columbia Press, New York, 1982, pp 1-2.
[21] Although he continues with, “From a feminist perspective, Parkour may very well be one of the answers for Western culture.” I’m not really sure he understands how questions that begin with verbs work. Q: Is it desirable to become abject? A: Parkour. Q: WTF?
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